Literati

Yesterday was a day off from work, as they needed the room I’ve been stationed in, the library, so I got to experience a lot of loll and gag. Less gag, more loll.

I still did spend time in a library, peeling myself from my couch to go sit in the local library and email and submit applications for higher education jobs. Here, Southern California, New York City … Northern Florida. Throwing out the seeds and seeing what sprouts.

I also got another book out of the library, and began to notice a trend of mine over the last few months. The latest books I’ve read have been:

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

I’ll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do) by Mark Greenside

Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine by Eric Weiner

Seriously, I’m Kidding... by Ellen Degeneres

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

and now

Bossypants by Tina Fey

As I was checking Tina Fey’s book out, I was able to connect a few dots through the above list. Firstly, there are the books that are about redemption – about people searching, seeking, going insane, going sane. Mark Greenside’s book is more of a bridge to the other category, not being a redemption, but certainly a “coming of age” (at 40) kind of an adventure. The other category, of course, being the comedienne’s books.

Something about this strikes the right balance with me. That, yes, I want to read about your harrowing walks through dark nights of the soul and wilderness and Vegas (see : Man Seeks God), but I also want to read the levity, candor, and strength of women in showbiz who are being pioneers in a different way.

I’d never been one for non-fiction, and all the above are. They’re all “memoirs.” I was raised picking up the library copies of my mom’s Stephen King novels, and for most of my junior high and high school years, I’d sit on the couch in the downstairs living room, engrossed in the psychological and physical mystery of King’s characters and plot. Everyone would eventually go up to bed, but I was too page-turned, and soon, it was late. And I was by myself, reading Stephen King in the middle of the night.

This, was not an altogether pleasant experience, so I’d read further, because if I closed the book, I’d have to turn off all the downstairs lights, and walk upstairs in the dark with visions of deranged clowns lurking in my peripheries. So, I read on, and then it’d be 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning, and my eyes scratchy from being open so long, and I’d finally give up, too exhausted to care if there were a rabid dog perched somewhere in the stairwell. I’d climb up to bed, and fall in, too tired to be awake enough to contemplate the darkness.

There were the years when I didn’t read anything at all, really. I call these college.

No, (!) just kidding. But after college, I read nothing much at all, or nothing that stands out. And I don’t really remember what I picked up next, but it wasn’t that many years ago.

I remember when I first got sober, within the first year, I went to see a movie at an indie theater in San Francisco. I had befriended a group of people who were wonderful and hilarious and lovely, but none of whom wanted to see anything like what I was seeing that day. I enjoyed the movie immensely, and when I walked out, I began to panic.

I’ll never have the kind of friends who’ll want to see anything like this with me. No one has the kind of taste I have. I’ll be destined to watch things and do things that interest me alone forever.

Fatalism is not just a river in Egypt. Melodrama, the same.

I began to cry. Honestly.

I called the one woman I trusted, and sobbed to her on the phone how alone I was, and that no one “got” me, and that I was too weird to have friends.

She told me to come over to her house right then. I sobbed even more that I didn’t know the San Francisco bus system, and I’d be stuck in Polk Gulch forever.

So, she told me how to catch the Geary or the California bus, and picked me up at a mutual spot, and fed me tea and calmed me down.

A few months later, I was outside my car with a group of people. One of them I’d just met, and she looked into my backseat and saw a book I had there (I honestly can't remember what it was). She exclaimed with delight – she had been meaning to read that book! How did I like it, what did I think? And I told her she could borrow it when I was done.

It felt like a revelation, even though it was such a “small” thing. I leant her the book. She leant me one. I began to form friendships with people who had similar tastes and interests, and who would undoubtedly today come with me to an indie movie theater.

It took time. It took a lot of time. I have a friend now who is going through similar transitions and longing for those kinds of connections, having been immersed in a relationship involvement so that it’s been hard to make the kind of friends she wants. So, I told her that story of the movie theater breakdown and the book-in-the-car new friend.

At some point, I turned from the sci-fi, novel genre (though The Illustrated Man sits on my shelf – moment of silence for Ray Bradbury, and his children’s room/lion story that has never left my consciousness). Today, the books I read are not paths into the mystery of the mind and the world, but out of them. (Though, someone once gave me a copy of The Power of Now, and each time I tried to read it, I a) threw up a little in my mouth, and b) twice --TWICE-- simply threw the damn thing sputtering across the room – this last time, just a few months ago. I’ve since given it away. Self-righteousness in a “spiritual” teacher is an ugly characteristic.)

It’s just interesting to me to notice what I’ve been attracted to lately. That it points to a change in course. I yoked a friend of mine to driving up to Jeanette’s reading when she was in town a few months ago, and that friend now has my copy – a friend of mine, wants to read something I’m interested in too. A friend of mine is interested in the things I am too. And she's not the only one. I’m no longer bereft and alone on a street corner drowning in the electric whine of MUNI wires and the stench of human misery.

Thank you, Brandie, for asking me about that book in my car.